Technological Aspects of Project Selection

ABSTRACT Project selection is a process fraught with uncertainties. Technological uncertainty is one of the major contributors to the total risk and its reduction has been a subject of many attempts to provide the decision maker with better decision material.
In the following paper, we summarise three cases representing different technological contents of technology transfer projects. The possible technological changes and the sensitivity of project profitability to them is presented and analysed.
A methodological approach involving convolution of the technological risk into a conventional economical project analysis has been developed and is evaluated in this paper. In particular, the aspect of trimming the analysis procedure into an efficient routine is discussed.     

The Pitfalls of International Integration: A Comment on the Bush Proposal and its Aftermath

In January 2003, the Bush Administration proposed a new system for taxing corporate dividends, under which domestic shareholders in U.S. corporations would not be taxed on dividends they received, provided the corporation distributed these dividends out of after-tax earnings (the Bush Proposal). The Bush Proposal was introduced in Congress on February 27, 2003. Ultimately, however, Congress balked at enacting full-fledged dividend exemption. Instead, in the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) as enacted on May 28, 2003, a lower rate of 15% was adopted for dividends paid by domestic and certain foreign corporations,¹ and the capital gains rate was likewise reduced to 15%. Significantly and in stark contrast to the original Bush proposal, under JGTRRA the lower rate for dividends and capital gains does not depend on any tax being paid at the corporate level.This comment will focus primarily on the international aspects of both the Bush Proposal and JGTRRA. I will not lay out the proposal or the law in any detail. Instead, I will ask whether either the Bush Proposal or JGTRRA make sense from an economic efficiency perspective when the international implications are taken into account. I will leave to others the question of whether either the Bush Proposal or JGTRRA are sensible ways to stimulate the economy (for discussion of the effect of the 2001 tax cuts see Shapiro and Slemrod, 2001, 2002). I will also omit any discussion of the distributive effects of either the Bush Proposal or JGTRRA, which have been extensively discussed elsewhere (e.g., Tax Policy Center, 2003; Burman, Gale and Orszag, 2003).     

Investor recognition and stock returns

It is well established that investment fundamentals, such as earnings and cash flows, can explain only a small proportion of the variation in stock returns. We find that investor recognition of a firm’s stock can explain relatively more of the variation in stock returns. Consistent with Merton’s (J Finance 42(3):483–510, 1987) theoretical analysis, we show that (i) contemporaneous stock returns are positively related to changes in investor recognition, (ii) future stock returns are negatively related to changes in investor recognition, (iii) the above relations are stronger for stocks with greater idiosyncratic risk and (iv) corporate investment and financing activities are both positively related to changes in investor recognition. Our research suggests that investors and managers who are concerned with firm valuation should consider investor recognition in addition to accounting information and related investment fundamentals.     

Ratings Changes,Ratings Levels,and the Predictive Value of Analysts’ Recommendations

We show that abnormal returns to analysts’ recommendations stem from both the ratings levels assigned and the changes in those ratings. Conditional on the ratings change, buy and strong buy recommendations have greater returns than do holds, sells, and strong sells. Conditional on the ratings level, upgrades earn the highest returns and downgrades the lowest. We also find that both ratings levels and changes predict future unexpected earnings and the associated market reaction. Our results imply that 1) investment returns may be enhanced by conditioning on both recommendation levels and changes; 2) the predictive power of analysts’ recommendations reflects, at least partially, analysts’ ability to generate valuable private information; and 3) some inconsistency exists between analysts’ ratings and the formal ratings definitions issued by securities firms.     

Trade in technology : Management decisions and pricing

In this article, a model of technology price estimation is developed. The process of trade in technology is seen as resulting in a partial transfer of the market in which the seller of the technology had previously sold his product to the buyer of the technology. Profit decrease of the seller because of market cuts is taken as the basis for the pricing of technology. The random nature of the useful lifetime of the technology is taken into account, and the influence of seller-firm characteristics on the technology price is analyzed.     

Venture Capital in Canada: Lessons for Building (or Restoring) National Wealth

Canadian policymakers and regulators have been praised for avoiding many of the policy blunders that, when combined with excessive risk-taking by the banks, nearly brought down the U.S. financial sector. But, as the global economy begins to recover, policymakers everywhere need to find ways to stimulate the creation of new ventures.
On that score, Canada's record is not encouraging. The returns on Canadian venture capital investment have been dismally low, particularly in its government-run funds. In a recent survey, 40% of U.S. venture capital partners identified Canada as having the least favorable treatment of investors of any country they had dealings with. And perhaps most troubling, half of the Canadian corporate executives responding to another survey cited "inability to retain talent" as the biggest threat to their firms.
The authors begin by suggesting that these findings are all related. Without investors and the know-how and networks they bring with them, a country's ability to attract, develop, and retain top talent—business and managerial talent in particular—is significantly reduced. And as the authors go on to argue, the key to building a successful venture capital industry is to match talent with capital in such a way that all three parties—talent, capital providers, and the "matchmakers" who bring together talent and capital—are rewarded for superior performance and held accountable for failure.     

Productivity, tradability, and the long-run price puzzle

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect. But looking back 50 years, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is often assumed to be a universal property is actually quite specific to recent times, emerging a half century ago and growing steadily over time. What might potentially explain this historical pattern? We develop an updated BS model inspired by recent developments in trade theory, where a continuum of goods are differentiated by productivity, and where tradability is endogenously determined. Firms experiencing productivity gains are more likely to become tradable and crowd out firms not experiencing productivity gains. As a result the usual BS assumption—that productivity gains be concentrated in the traded goods sector—emerges endogenously, and the BS effect on relative price levels likewise evolves gradually over time.     

Gerschenkron Redux? Analysing New Evidence on Joint‐Stock Enterprise in Pre‐War Shanghai

Alexander Gerschenkron (1904–78) famously postulated that the more backward an economy was at the outset of industrialisation, the more reliant it would be on state‐backed banks as a means of directing investment. Gerschenkron thereby implied that impersonal equity markets were likely to play a less significant role in countries aiming to catch up with the West. This article is aimed at examining Gerschenkron's thesis primarily through an analysis of shareholding in 1930s Shanghai. Drawing on newly discovered archival material as well as on recent studies, the paper clarifies the magnitude of joint‐stock enterprise and the ubiquity of stock‐exchange trade in a city that was by far China's most important economic hub. The pattern of joint‐stock enterprise in pre‐war China is compared with that of Japan, the first non‐Western society to become fully industrialised. The argument advanced is that Gerschenkron's thesis incorrectly played down the significance of impersonal equity markets to pre‐war Japan's successful industrialisation and to the limited nature of pre‐war China's industrialisation. Japan could sustain its industrialisation thrust in the early 20th century on a nation‐wide scale partly because of the growing vitality of its equity markets in Tokyo and Osaka. By contrast, China's pre‐war industrialisation was much less extensive because its equity markets were more limited.     

A contextual analysis of the impact of managerial expectations on asymmetric cost behavior

Review of Accounting Studies - We examine the effect of managerial expectations on asymmetric cost behavior in the context of resource adjustment costs and unused resource constraints. Our results...